OS: The base OS version for FreeNAS 11 was upgraded to FreeBSD 11.0-STABLE which delivers a large number of OS-related bug fixes, performance improvements, software enhancements and new features. Initial testing indicates that the FreeNAS 11 kernel is 20% faster than FreeNAS 9.10.
Directory Services: Active Directory provides a number of critically important directory services for Windows domain network environments. FreeNAS 11 introduces a key enhancement that maintains Active Directory services online even if there are networking issues and interruptions. This allows Active Directory users to maintain consistent mapping and thus connections on MacOS and FreeNAS 11 systems.
Object & Cloud Storage: FreeNAS is now Amazon S3 compatible! FreeNAS includes is object storage software that connects FreeNAS systems together to present object storage to S3 clients; FreeNAS users can now build FreeNAS into their own private cloud or integrate it as part of a hybrid cloud.
Services: The 'Services' pages have been re-designed to add the ability to manage which services and applications are started at boot.
New Alert Services: Also new in FreeNAS 11 is an Alert Service page which configures the system to send critical alerts from FreeNAS to other applications and services such as Slack, PagerDuty, AWS, Hipchat, InfluxDB, Mattermost, OpsGenie, and VictorOps. Now you can tell FreeNAS how best to alert you if there is an issue with your FreeNAS without changing the way you monitor your existing infrastructure.
VM: FreeNAS 11.0 adds bhyve virtual machine support, letting you host web-scale VMs on your FreeNAS system. Jails and plugins are also supported. But this type of virtualization does require an Intel processor with Extended Page Tables (EPT) or an AMD processor with Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and/or Nested Page Tables (NPT). If you have one of these system types, take advantage of native VM support today.
UI: The FreeNAS GUI will be getting a new a makeover! You can preview a beta version of the administration GUI. The new GUI is more responsive and strikingly elegant in design but follows a similar workflow to the existing GUI. The new and classic GUIs are selectable from the login screen, allowing you to experience the new GUI.
Other notable changes:
1) The popular Samba protocol has been (SMB filesharing) updated to 4.6.3. Similarly, Netatalk has been updated to 3.1.10.
2) FreeBSD ports have been updated to follow the FreeBSD 2016Q4 branch.